The principles that have classically defined liberalism
-- the primacy of the individual; the distinction between civil society and the
political state; natural law and natural rights; political equality and limited
government; private property and free enterprise -- existed in piecemeal form
at various times before the advent of John Locke. We may think of the Greek
Sophists, the Roman Stoics, the biblical separation of Caesar and God, the Spanish
Scholastics, Milton, Spinoza. And among the key examples of practice that
preceded theory are Magna Carta of England, Magdeburg law of Germany, the Golden Bull of Hungary, and the toleration of
seventeenth-century Holland. But it is in Locke that the philosophy of liberalism
finds its fountainhead. With his Second Treatise on Government, he
distilled these principles from his precursors and linked them together into a
practical framework for contemporary government -- that is, as a confident
creed to challenge royal absolutism:

* "The natural
liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be
under the will or legislative authority of man, but only have the law of nature
for his rule."

* "[Each man] is
willing to join in Society with others for the mutual Preservation of their
Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call by the general Name, Property."

* "Government has no
other end than the preservation of property."

Among the links was one
between political liberty and private property, which would take the world
stage in a single year not even a century later. In 1776, the American
colonists issued a Declaration of Independence that echoed Locke for all its
central themes, and Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations, the work
that founded the science of economics with its demonstration of the productive
superiority and universal benevolence of the free market. Liberalism was
evolving from the proposals of philosophers into the policy of governments.
(The term itself eventually came from the Spanish parliament's anti-monarchist Liberales of the 1820s. Marx soon
after added "capitalism" as a synonym.)

The century of 1815-1914 is widely recognized as the
liberal epoch, a period of industrial progress, unprecedented growth in both population and living standards, expansion of
individual liberties and social tolerance, the abolition of slavery and
serfdom, a reprieve from major wars, and the waning of political
authoritarianism. "Until August 1914," observed British historian A.
J. P. Taylor, "a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life
and hardly notice the existence of the state." The government did not
control how he lived, where he lived, where he traveled, what he purchased,
whom he traded with, or whether he should enlist in the military. "It left
the adult citizen alone." Such is the laissez faire that comes to mind
when we speak of classical liberalism.

And so the question arises: How did liberalism
transform, moving to our American context, from a term denoting a policy of
Jeffersonian domestic liberty and Washingtonian foreign non-entanglement into a
synonym for what has been called the "welfare-warfare state?" How did
a "liberal" go from being an advocate of limited government to being
one of expansive statism? Was this change substantive
or semantic, i.e., an example of ideological evolution or an act of
terminological theft?

Proponents of the latter theory included the economist
Joseph Schumpeter, who quipped, "As a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of private enterprise have thought
it wise to appropriate its label." That the "new" liberalism was
in many ways part of the collectivist reaction against the old was not
something that these "enemies" would (or even could) outright deny.
Indeed, in 1934 the Nation opined that "the New Deal in the United
States, the new forms of economic organization in Germany and Italy, and the
planned economy of the Soviet Union" were all strands of the trend
"for nations and groups ... [to] demand a larger measure of security than
can be provided by a system of free enterprise."

Even earlier, John Dewey stated that the
"reconstruction" of society by the American electorate "would
signify that we had entered constructively and voluntarily upon the road which
Soviet Russia is traveling with so much attendant destruction and
coercion." And yet he called himself not a Marxist but a liberal -- a
"new" liberal -- and his ideas not collectivism but individualism --
a "new" individualism. Evidently this terminology served double duty
by separating American statism from the tyrannies of
its European counterparts and associating it with the glories of our Western
and Revolutionary heritage. "Liberalism" was the proverbial velvet
glove.

There are two more points to be made for the case for
label-theft. One is that, in contrast to the Anglo-American world, the term
largely retains its meaning on the Continent, where a “liberal” is still one
who is pro-laissez faire. It would be a difficult task indeed to promote welfarism as "new" in a land where "poor
laws" go all the way back to Rome. The other is the simple fact that the
term really never lost its original meaning completely. When we speak of the U.S. or the U.K. or even Sweden as a "liberal" democracy, the term refers to
the large measure of political freedom and private property that still
constitutes the base of each nation, not to the overlaying socialistic
programs that burden that base.

The contention that the change in liberalism's meaning
represents a change in liberal thought is always made in reference to a single
thinker: John Stuart Mill. Contrary to a popular impression, Mill never adopted
socialism and actually grew more critical of it (cf. his unfinished Chapters
on Socialism). His real break with (rather than "development of")
liberal theory was the proposition that the distribution of wealth,
unlike its production, was not subject to natural economic laws or property
rights: "The things once there, mankind ... can do with them as they
like." The resulting formula -- private production but political redistribution
-- is easily recognizable as the contemporary Anglo-American model. In 1905,
legal scholar A. V. Dicey taught that Mill's dissent was

inEngland, to a great extent, the cause of the transition from
... individualism ... to ... collectivism. His teaching specially affected the
men who were just entering public life towards 1870. It prepared them at any
rate to accept, if not to welcome, the collecti[vism] which from that time
onwards has gained increasing strength.

Eventually, those
disciples of that collectivism (such as L. T. Hobhouse)
who opposed Fabian imperialism and Shavian authoritarianism would point to Mill
and claim their own collectivism to be the scion of liberal ancestry -- which seems
to bring us back around to the velvet glove.

However, in terms of both semantic usage and governmental
policy, "liberalism" is most widely associated today with a single
concept: the mixed economy, i.e., a state that is neither completely capitalist
(laissez faire) nor totally socialist (totalitarian). It is, to be sure, a
union of conflicting -- liberal vs. anti-liberal -- elements. As F. A. Hayek,
the great twentieth-century scholar of liberalism, observed: If we have the
redistribution of wealth, then what of private property? If we enact biased
laws to effect economic (or "social")
equality, then what of political equality? If we regard the collective as the
essential entity (which Hayek called "anthropomorphism or
personification"), then what of the primacy of the individual?

To be capitalist or to be socialist?
-- that is the question. Precisely what is the mix of
the mixed economy? When is it capitalist and when is it socialist? When does it
protect property and when does it confiscate it? When does it leave people
alone and when does it coerce them? When does it adhere to the ethics of
individualism and when does it obey the code of collectivism? And just which is
the metaphysical primary -- the individual or the collective (e.g., the nation,
the race, the class)? The fundamental truth about the mixed economy is that
mixed practices imply mixed principles, which in turn imply mixed premises --
i.e., an incoherent grasp of reality. With socialism, the chaos was economic;
with "social democracy," it's epistemological. Ultimately, the latter
can no more generate rational policies than the former could generate rational
prices. The mixed economy doesn't present us with a mosaic portrait of the just
society, but with a jigsaw of pieces taken from different puzzles.

And it is just that jumble that constitutes the modern
liberal welfare state. Consider its exemplar, the "liberal," who
supports laissez faire for social issues but statism
for economic issues. The soundness of this position is best demonstrated by how
easily it is inverted by his putative opponent, the "conservative,"
who supports laissez faire for economic issues but statism
for social issues ("social-issues socialism"). Both, however, belong
to a generation now gone. As if ideology possessed its own laws of genetics,
inconsistency has begotten only more inconsistency. Among the present
generation we behold liberals who no more support free speech (e.g., Catharine
MacKinnon) than their conservative peers support free trade (e.g., Patrick Buchanan).
We see people who

* support affirmative
action, free trade, and immigration (such as the liberal Michael Kinsley and
the conservative William Bennett)

* oppose all three (such
as the liberal Michael Lind and the aforementioned Buchanan)

* support affirmative
action and immigration but oppose free trade (such as the liberal Jesse
Jackson)

* support free trade but
oppose affirmative action and immigration (such as the conservative Peter Brimelow)

* support free trade and
immigration but oppose affirmative action (such as any
"neoconservative" -- or "neoliberal"
-- you can name).

We can have a veritable
"Heinz-57" of possible positions if we consider the multitude of
thinkers, activists, and voters, and the only unity that comes out of all this
division is the common (implicit) creed they share:

a) Give us the tax dollars
and the tax breaks, but give them the tax bill.

b) Give us liberty, but
get those perverts!

After all, while there is
a myriad of voices clamoring for censorship, who ever says,
"There has to be some limit on free speech, and we should start
with mine"? Among all the calls for protectionism, do we ever hear,
"You know what? Give the competition the subsidies. Me, I'll bear the
rigors of the market"? Capitalist freedoms and socialist entitlements for
me, but socialist restrictions and capitalist responsibilities for thee -- that
becomes the mix of the mixed economy. Such is the "idealism" that
distinguishes contemporary liberalism from the "selfishness" of
classical liberalism and its establishment of the same rights for oneself and
one's neighbor.

As universal principles, the self-interest of capitalism
and the self-sacrifice of socialism have both given way to the "special
interests" of pressure groups. Consequently, we no longer really have
political philosophies so much as political lobbies hiding under the wool.
Feminism is perhaps but one of the more obvious examples. This is not an
ideology but an advocacy group that will say whatever its takes to load the
dice in its members' favor. Chants of "privacy" and
"choice" are sufficient to establish a "woman's right to control
her own body" (abortion), but not enough to establish a man's right to
control his own mind (free speech). The politics of
prohibition? While feminists widely dismiss the notion that the
outlawing of guns will mean that only outlaws will have guns, they regard
virtually as divine revelation the notion that the outlawing of abortion will
mean that only outlaws ("back-alley butchers") will perform abortions.
(Their conservative opponents, who ostensibly flip the issues, share this
fair-weather recognition of the law of unintended consequences.) And while they
oppose individualism and defend popular democracy, does the former find a
better friend -- or the latter a fiercer foe -- than the feminist fighting to
maintain the wall of separation between Abortion and Plebiscite?

When a principle or premise defends one's case, it is
affirmed; when it doesn't, it's denied. Think about these two statements:

a) Individuals have the
right to engage in consensual private behavior even if it can harm them.

b) The government has the
duty to stop individuals from engaging in consensual private behavior that can
harm them.

So, which does our
"liberal" believe in? Well, if the issue's smoking, the second. But if it's "sodomy," then the first.And the "conservative"?Just the
reverse. What prevails is a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't commitment to
any tenet. Moral integrity falls to personal prejudice, and hypocrisy becomes
the standard of "social democracy."

Soon enough, however, such hypocrisy on everyone's part
becomes impossible to miss, as witness the exchange of barbs on the sundry
"debate" shows. And "victimology"
-- of which the above feminism is definitely one of the more obvious examples
-- collapses when everyone eventually claims (on one basis or another) victim
status. The "end of ideology" truly has arrived. Laws are passed, not
with reference to philosophic principles, but only with an eye on the polls; "social
democracy" devolves into majoritarian democracy
-- a one-party democracy, where Republicans and Democrats "run towards the
center" as closely as possible. Realizing James Madison's great fear in Federalist
No. 10, the country has come to that stage where "measures are too often
decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor
party; but by the superior force of an interested and over-bearing
majority."

There is, of course, another conceivable direction for
the mixed economy: the opposite one, i.e., a move towards ideological
consistency, be it capitalist or socialist.

We'll examine the second possibility first. The name
Ludwig von Mises gained currency during the demise of
the Soviet Union because many (e.g., Robert Heilbroner,
who was generally not known for his sympathy to free market theories) pointed
to his prediction that a socialized economy could only decline because its
abolition of the market robbed itself of any means to rationally calculate
prices and thus determine production. But the Austrian economist also made
another stark prediction -- that a mixed economy could
not help but move towards total control. His argument ran like this: Imagine
that the first control mixed into the economy is a price ceiling on the sale of
milk, since the politicians promised to make it more affordable.What invariably follows is that the marginal
producers of milk go out of business; milk actually becomes less plentiful and
more expensive. Now the politicians can repeal this control -- or they can
impose a new one on the "factors of production necessary for the
production of milk ... But then the same story repeats itself" on a wider
level. If the latter course is chosen, we logically head towards socialization
of the entire economy.

Let's move from milk in theory to medicine in practice.
For about a hundred years, America has been a nation of accumulating medical controls.
Each new regulation was passed with the same justification made for the
previous one: This measure will sufficiently correct the failings of the free
market and thus save the free market system. And the result?
Today's "crisis in health care" -- as the welfare statists
themselves call this iatrogenic disease. The more band-aids are applied, the
more wounds appear! And with nothing but band-aids in their bags, these
"liberals" (often the same aging advocates of past regulation) can
now prescribe only covering the patient head to toe -- i.e., the final move to
the outright socialization of all medicine. What this says about the microcosm
of medicine is obvious; what it means for our mixed economy is ominous.

What limits the limited welfare state? Even with
socialism discredited both theoretically and practically, state control over
society grows. Do the apologists for government intervention imagine that we
can move isotopically towards the electrified fence
of totalitarianism without ever touching it? This political progression has its
semantic parallel: As the nation encompasses greater government control, so
does the meaning of “liberalism.” When the term (like the country) shifted from
laissez faire to interventionism, with the advocates of the former renamed
“conservatives,” both the term and the policy continued down that road --
unstoppably: Progressivism, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society. When some liberals (including a few
leftists-turned-liberals) in the 70s opposed any further move beyond the
"alphabet soup" (FDR-JFK-LBJ) consensus, they suddenly became
"neoconservatives." A person wasn't a neoconservative because he
rejected Hubert Humphrey liberalism in favor of a return to Jim Crow, but
because he clung to its opposition to quotas and "affirmative action"
in the face of the absorption of such programs by the "liberal"
juggernaut. And when that juggernaut then absorbed the sunny disposition
towards the Soviet Union of George McGovern and his supporters,
"neoconservative" pushed out even "Cold War liberal" as a
term to denote Henry Jackson and the older (now former) liberals. Any number of
persons and publications (e.g., The New Republic) went from
"liberal" to "neoconservative" merely by standing still.
Despite both hope and hysteria over the possibility of the contrary, liberal
policies expanded in the Reagan-Bush era, and by the 90s the term itself had
hit the fence -- and plowed through. Now no one was too left to be
"liberal." Radio personality Rush Limbaugh used it to describe the
once "radical" William Kunstler, and
literary theorist Stanley Fish, a "politically correct" leftist who
nonetheless is himself often labeled a "liberal," tagged civil
libertarian Nat Hentoff, once the prototypical
liberal, as "right wing" -- for his uncompromising defense of free
speech. One wonders drolly if in a few years the only "liberal" left
in the Western Hemisphere will be Economic Democrat for Life Fidel Castro.

That last thought returns us to the question: What limits
the limited welfare state? Not only has "liberalism" meant ever
greater economic controls, but now it means the application of socialist
ideology to social issues. This has always been a dubious dichotomy --
Is a book a manufactured product or an expressed idea? -- and
one that didn't exist among either the classical liberals or the Marxist
regimes. Yet a surging number of voices tell us that "equality"
demands, not only a redistribution of wealth, but also the banning of speech --
not only an end to "economic violence," but also the suppression of
"verbal violence." How this rhetoric translates into reality can be
glimpsed by looking north. The legal perversity that pornography constitutes
the criminal "exploitation" and "objectification" of
women -- a linguistic legerdemain whereby bourgeois feminists exculpate their
own capitalist occupations as the "exploitation" and
"objectification" of the proletariat, thus metamorphosing themselves
from class oppressors into gender victims -- was affirmed by the Canadian
Supreme Court. This idea, in turn, evolved into that of "hate
speech," which was extended to "protect" other groups, such as
homosexuals. So now when the Rev. Jerry Falwell airs
his show in Canada, he must edit his preachings
on homosexuality, which are not protected by freedom of religion or freedom of
speech. Here is a "welfare state" that has gone well beyond taxing
millionaires to house orphans.

That last thought returns us to the question: What limits
the limited welfare state? Not only has "liberalism" meant ever
greater economic controls, but now it means the application of socialist
ideology to social issues. This has always been a dubious dichotomy --
Is a book a manufactured product or an expressed idea? -- and
one that didn't exist among either the classical liberals or the Marxist
regimes. Yet a surging number of voices tell us that "equality"
demands, not only a redistribution of wealth, but also the banning of speech --
not only an end to "economic violence," but also the suppression of
"verbal violence."

How this rhetoric translates into reality can be glimpsed
by looking north. The legal perversity that pornography constitutes the criminal
"exploitation" and "objectification" of women -- a
linguistic legerdemain whereby bourgeois feminists exculpate their own
capitalist occupations as the "exploitation" and
"objectification" of the proletariat, thus metamorphosing themselves
from class oppressors into gender victims -- was affirmed by the Canadian
Supreme Court. This idea, in turn, evolved into that of "hate
speech," which was extended to "protect" other groups, such as
homosexuals. So now when the Rev. Jerry Falwell airs
his show in Canada, he must edit his preachings
on homosexuality, which are not protected by freedom of religion or freedom of
speech. Here is a "welfare state" that has gone well beyond taxing
millionaires to house orphans.

It's all really very easy to understand as the
philosophic analogue to Mises' economic analysis. The
initial introduction of a socialist law into a liberal society forces the
question: Do we accept or reject this violation of the liberal ethic? If we
accept it, we set a precedent for the next proposed socialist law. We have made
a very clear moral decision -- collectivism trumps individualism. In contrast
to the cynicism that leads to a deluge of special interest groups, this trend
involves taking ideas seriously -- i.e., recognizing the mutual
exclusiveness of the capitalist and socialist paradigms, and thus the
imperative to choose one. It acknowledges the hypocrisy -- the incoherence --
of bringing the socialist outlook to issue A but not
issue B, to the "economic" issue but not the "social"
issue.

A commitment to greater statism
begets more such commitments, and if what we may call the Ronald Dworkin generation pooh-poohed the "silly proposition
that true liberals must respect economic as well as intellectual liberty,"
the Cass Sunstein generation repudiates as even
sillier the proposition that liberals cannot impose on the free market of ideas
the same doctrines and controls they impose on the free market in widgets. The
esteemed professor of law has insisted that speech, like commerce, must have
its own "New Deal." With Sunstein as
thought control's FDR, who will be its LBJ?

As the no-end-in-sight march of greater government
demonstrates, there is no reason to think that democracy is a check on
despotism. An electoral majority can indeed embrace the concept and agenda of
unlimited statism. "Totalitarian democracy"
exists, not merely as a troubling conjecture, but as a threatening possibility.

Another possibility, however, is that people might take
the idea of liberty seriously. By the end of the twentieth century,
"the planned economy of the Soviet
Union" finally followed
into oblivion "the new forms of economic organization in Germany and Italy." A general respect for a foundation of private
property and a market economy emerged among both intellectuals and the
populace, edging out hopes for socialism with any kind of face. This was due in
part to the lessons of Communist experience, in part to the renascent teachings
of Mises and Hayek. Free market economists have made
their influence felt in everything from history (debunking the canard that
unregulated "market forces" caused the Great Depression) to theory
(refuting the general theories of John Maynard Keynes, the Marx of the mixed
economy) to policy -- the rise of free trade between nations (even though the
actual treaties often muddle free trade with pages of protectionism).

An indication of this trend can be found in the latest
edition of The American Heritage College Dictionary, which, in addition
to a "political theory favoring civil and political liberties,"
further defines liberalism as an "economic theory in favor of
laissez-faire, the free market, and the gold standard."Possibly as a reaction against this recent
semantic development, diehard proponents of statism
on the left have taken to once again calling themselves
"progressives" (e.g., Ralph Nader, a
liberal until late). As a practical challenge to the welfare state, only New Zealand in the mid-80s (and ThatcheriteBritain, to a lesser extent) succeeded in cutting government
down to a significantly smaller size. But the ideal of laissez faire continues
to thrive, most notably within the libertarian movement, which poses a
challenge on all levels to the dog-eat-dog grapplings
of the special interest groups. In doing so, they are reflecting the wisdom of
one of their classical liberal forebears, himself something of a founder of a
new "movement," who wrote, "Whenever we depart from the
principle of equal rights, we plunge into a labyrinth of difficulty from which
there is no way out but by retreating."

Bibliography

E.K. Bramsted
and K.J. Melhuish (ed.), Western Liberalism: A
History in Documents from Locke to Croce, 1978.

Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., The Decline
of American Liberalism, 1955.

John Gray, Liberalism,
1986.

Louis Hartz,
The Liberal Tradition in America, 1955.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill, 1974.